Review & Giveaway: Survive to Dawn by PJ Schnyder

Publisher: Carina Press
Where did you get this book: eARC from Author
Release Date: Out now

The zombie epidemic in London has been contained, but that’s all the werewolf pack that protects the city has been able to manage. Danny, as pack medic, is concerned the epidemic isn’t showing any signs of slowing down. And that the pack’s Alpha is too focused on eliminating the deadly threat to consider working toward a cure. When a team of American scientists arrive, talking of a vaccine, Danny is quietly hopeful.

Deanna thought she was prepared for anything. But an argument with the London pack leaves her research team exposed and alone, on their own against countless hordes of the walking dead. Within hours, her colleagues are slaughtered…and it’s only because of Danny that she manages to get out alive.

Deanna unhinges Danny in every way, tempting him beyond reason. She also pushes him to face the one thing he’d been avoiding: his Alpha is wrong. Simply surviving isn’t the answer…it can’t be.

*Blurb taken from Goodreads*

Survive to Dawn is the fascinating conclusion of PJ Schnyder’s London Undead trilogy. It manages to answer all the questions and contain a simmering love story into the bargain. And it’s a geek romance, which adds to the fun. The science geek girl gets the hot werewolf, who happens to be a bit of a geek himself!

Danny is the werewolf pack medic that we’ve been introduced to in the first two books of this series (Bite Me (reviewed last week at Reading Reality) and Sing for the Dead (reviewed today). He’s the one who patches them up when they get so wounded that they’ll bleed out before the change can heal them.

But Danny is also a scientist. He’s been sending zombie tissue samples to other scientists all around the world, in the hunt for a cure to the zombie virus. Or at least a vaccine. Anything to stop the zombie plague. Because as good a job as the London werewolf pack does at keeping the zombies at bay, the zombies are winning. They “reproduce” way faster than the werewolves can.

It doesn’t help that every scientific expedition and herd of big game hunting tourists just adds to the number of zombies.

Deanna is one of those scientists. She and her team of American researchers think that they have a working vaccine–but they need to test it on live subjects. Or undead subjects, since what they really want is to capture a zombie and record its reaction to the anti-toxin. The werewolf pack alpha will let them in, but no captures and no cages. He knows it’s way too easy for things to get out of hand, because it’s already happened.

And of course the scientists go ahead anyway, even though they refuse the pack’s protection. They’re not just scientists, but arrogant and superior, because they think they’re so smart and that the werewolves can’t possibly understand their reasoning. And because they don’t believe the zombie plague could possibly be as bad as it is.

And they’re wrong. I’d say dead wrong, but in some cases undead and wrong would be closer to the mark. Not that they are aware of it anymore.

Except Deanna. She survives. Partly because Danny follows her on his own, and partly because werewolves are not the only supernatural creatures to emerge into the creepy light of the zombie infested world.

Deanna is a witch. And she’s on a mission to find the cache of information that her twin sister left her somewhere in London, before she died.

Deanna finds more secrets than she ever imagined in her worst nightmare. And possibly a future for them all.

Verdict: Each story in this series has escalated the tension, as the villains have gotten bigger and stronger, although not necessarily more evil. They’ve become less human and more powerful, but even a human who would take advantage of the zombie plague for economic gain is still plenty damn evil.

While I absolutely loved the way that this story comes full circle (which I’m not going to spoil, it’s too awesome) I did find the time frame just a bit too compressed to be realistic. The idea that the world, or even just London, went from normal to zombified and almost completely without law or particularly order in only a year doesn’t seem quite right. I can accept that it would go to hell in a handcart under the circumstances, but it felt like the forces of good and order wouldn’t abandon ship quite so fast. YMMV.

There’s a bit of an insta-love going on, but it plays nicely off the “werewolves mate for life” concept. Also, just because Danny figures out instantly that Deanna is his mate, doesn’t mean that she has to fall in line. Eventually, of course, or this wouldn’t be a romance, but he has to work on convincing her that they are made for each other. And the only way to do that is to help her with her quest for the truth, even if it puts him at odds with his pack leader.

The final showdown and big reveal at the end of the book was both awesome and surprising. I loved it!

About Marlene

Marlene is a librarian, ebook advocate, science fiction fan, and RPG fan who lives in Atlanta. She and her husband are owned by three cats, just ask them. She's a geek and a nerd and proud of it. She's also an avid reader of everything, including the back of the cereal box, and has been blogging since April 2011 at Reading Reality and is a reviewer at Library Journal as well as active on Goodreads.

I confess I hadn’t heard anything about this series, but it does sound interesting.

I want to comment on the “compressed time frame” bit, though. I do think that it wouldn’t take too long–and a year seems reasonable–for the rats to abandon the infected ship, as it were. There would probably be a lot of noise about the tragedy and blah blah, but the reality is that nations and societies tend to quickly become blind to other people’s problems given a bit of distance from them (Darfur, Somalia, etc etc etc)

This is the first I can remember hearing about this series and it’s the last book! I’ve read shifter books (many, many,many) and zombie books (not as many), but never the two mixed. Sounds interesting.

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